Blended

Blended is not the worst thing Adam Sandler has ever done. For my money, that superlative goes to Grown Ups 2, though I've heard dutiful cases for Jack & Jill and That's My Boy as well. But beyond any of these travesties is Blended utterly unworthy of anybody's time. A morbid fascination with what might pass for outsider art in the form of uniquely bad movies like the ones listed above could be enough driving force to check them out. As much as I hated Grown Ups 2, I have to give it credit for at least sending me careening down a valley of explosive ideas. But Blended is wholly uninteresting in its badness. Nothing about it boasts originality, imagination, weirdness, or even the hint that anybody thought about what they were making. It's dumb, it's thick, it's careless. It's bad in all the most useless of ways.

If you must know, the story sees Sandler and Drew Barrymore, a widower and a divorcee who shared a catastrophic blind date (thanks entirely to the follies of the lovable male character), bumping into each other on an African vacation with their respective litters. I won't bother getting into the contrivance that led them to such a profound coincidence, since I'm already agitated over having relived the basic premise. Although they are indelibly incompatible, Sandler and Barrymore gradually bond over a mutual love for their children, and begin to fill the roles of absent parent for each other's kids. Barrymore has two boys, so naturally Sandler needs to teach them how to box and swing a bat. That's what boys do, right? And Sandler's oldest daughter needs Barrymore to teach her how to be girly. Because up until now, she's been into sports, and that just won't do.

Seriously, that's a lesson that Sandler learns in this debacle: his daughter, a 15-year-old girl, shouldn't be filling her flighty head with pipe dreams about athletic prowess. She should be dressing up and chasing boys. That's what Barrymore insists, anyway. And never mind what the daughter herself, played by Bella Thorne, has to say about it. The movie doesn't ever bother to get her opinion on the matter.

Throughout all its misguided aggressive heteronormativity, Blended forgets that comedy exists in a realm beyond middle-aged men getting hit by parachutes and ostriches. Its only laughs come from fellow vacationer Kevin Nealon - not because his material is any good, just because Kevin Nealon is a naturally funny dude - and Terry Crews as the head of a functional Greek chorus. Admittedly offensive in its depiction of Africans (as is the movie on the whole), the device does manage a few chuckles thanks largely to Crews' physical moxy.

But four or five smirks aside, Blended is a wholly humorless, witless, charmless dullard. Something too forgettable to truly hate, but too misguided to shrug off. And even with that logical paradox, it remains bafflingly uninteresting.

MovieTickets.com is a worldwide leader in advance film ticketing and a top destination for news, celebrity interviews, film reviews and trailers. You can also access cinema information, check film showtimes, view video clips, and much more.